On the lookout for more chambers of secrets, "Harry Potter" veteran Daniel Radcliffe plays a lawyer charged with overseeing the sale of a gloomy estate in "The Woman in Black."

Sometimes clichés get a bad name.

Yes, no one likes to see the same, tired sexist/racist/ethnic stereotypes. But Westerns about that sick old gunfighter trying to do one final redemptive act? Caper movies about the colorful gang that tries to pull off an elaborate heist?

In genre movies, those aren’t clichés. They’re comfort food.

Horror movies have their own dependable tropes, too. The frightened innkeeper (“We’ve got no rooms here!”). The dog who barks at unseen threats. The busy, but quite empty, rocking chair.

They all show up in “The Woman in Black” — and familiar as they are, it’s rather fun to make their reacquaintance.

This new, Edwardian ghost story is the latest from the back-from-the-dead Hammer Films, which is proving far feebler than its Count Dracula ever was.

Its first movie, the quite good “Let Me In,” never found an audience. Its second, the rather bad “The Resident,” went straight to DVD.

This picture should do a little better, and not just because it has Daniel Radcliffe in it to lure bereft Harry Potter fans.

Beautifully set-designed and quietly well-acted, it’s a predictable but enjoyable horrorfest, until a forced and slightly disappointing end.

Radcliffe plays a young grieving lawyer with a dead wife, a cute son and too many bills. His cold bosses — it’s the sort of firm where Scrooge & Marley are probably the senior partners — send him up to Yorkshire to handle the sale of a gloomy old estate.

Cue the scared innkeeper, barking dog and rocking chair.

None of it’s new, but it’s fun particularly because — like those Hammer films of yore — it peoples its great sets with solid actors. Ciaran Hinds is the squire who refuses to believe the local tales of a vengeful ghost. Janet McTeer is his mad wife, who clearly does.

Think too much about what’s going on and it begins to go to pieces. This is what separates “The Woman in Black” from truly great ghost movies such as “The Innocents,” “The Haunting” and “The Others.”

We don’t get enough background on that horrible, supposedly haunted house that Radcliffe is supposed to sell. Neither is it ever made quite clear why he’s even up there (when a local official protests he could have sent Radcliffe all the necessary legal papers by post, you think — well, yes, actually, he could have. Bother.)

And then there’s the last 20 minutes, which falter a bit, and somehow manage to end with both a bang and a whimper.

But the long middle of the movie, with Radcliffe holding a candle and running around the shunned house in the middle of a rainstorm — and finding a different terror behind every door — is just what you’d expect in a movie like this.

And, sometimes, that’s exactly what you want.

Ratings note: The film contains violence and frightening images.

The Woman in Black (PG-13) CBS Films (95 min.)
Directed by James Watkins. With Daniel Radcliffe, Janet McTeer, Ciaran Hinds. Now playing in New Jersey.
THREE STARS